Gift of the Gods

Ben Counter

‘Banishment,’ spat Lord Antonidas Hajos of the Dire Claws. In the darkness of the shuttlecraft, his face was lit from beneath by the glowing power coils of his armour. ‘Why did they not just kill me? Put my head upon a pike at the fortress gates? Why was it banishment?’

‘It is written,’ replied Chirurgeon Koridis. ‘The Chapter pronounced exile as the punishment for attempting to usurp their Chapter Master.’

‘A law from an age of cowards!’ snarled Hajos. ‘Those were the times when the Dire Claws still skulked beneath the Imperial yoke! Even though we have cast off the Corpse-God for the lords of the warp, the cowardice remains. They feared to make a martyr of me, chirurgeon! The discontented would kneel before my severed head and carry it onto the battlements of our fortress in triumph! I was banished because they fear what I would become in death.’

The shuttle touched down. It had been fuelled only enough to reach the world nearest to the Dire Claws capital ship on which Hajos had been tried. Now it had reached that world, and its engines shut down for the last time.

‘They shall curse their folly,’ said Hajos, ‘that they let me live.’

The shuttle’s rear ramp boomed open to reveal a sweltering mass of jungle, a dark green ocean of choking foliage. The ship had come to rest on a hill of clear ground, and Hajos could see for miles across the rolling canopy, broken occasionally by mountains and plateaus. The sky overhead was deep blue and hung with heavy clouds, and it was speckled with columns of shrieking avian creatures set to flight by the shuttle’s arrival.

‘We were fortunate,’ said Koridis as he emerged from the shuttle beside Hajos.

‘Fortunate? We were betrayed!’ Hajos’ battered, leathery face creased with anger. ‘We have been reduced to vagabonds, and you call us fortunate?’

‘We could have been exiled to a dead world,’ replied Koridis, his own expression unchanging. Of all the Dire Claws, Koridis seemed the most immune to Hajos’ rages. ‘Or one otherwise inimical to survival. This is a world full of life.’

Hajos seemed about to speak, but something mollified him and his face turned from angry to stern. ‘Full of life,’ he said. ‘Brethren! Scout around! I will not tarry here!’

Less than half of Squad Morituris had accompanied Hajos on his exile. They had joined him in storming the throne room of the Dire Claws’ fortress-monastery, and those who now jumped down from the shuttle were all that had survived the ensuing firefight. Sergeant Morituris had been among the dead, and now Brother Forelm was their de facto leader.

‘Perimeter!’ ordered Forelm, gesturing with his power axe. ‘Give me eyes all around! Seek a foothold, we are too exposed up here! Get to it, vermin!’

‘Where there is life,’ said Hajos as the Dire Claws spread out, ‘there are the foundations of an empire. From less than this have mighty civilisations been wrought.’

‘Our priority should be our immediate survival,’ said Koridis. The chirurgeon had joined Hajos in exile for reasons of his own – he had not been among the would-be Chapter Master’s conspirators. He had claimed that his purpose was to retrieve the gene-seed of any fallen exiles and return it one day to the Dire Claws, but few had believed him.

‘I shall let the brethren deal with that,’ replied Hajos. ‘I must think for the long term. Survival is not enough, not for a Dire Claw! We do not survive, Koridis. We rule!’

‘I see signs of habitation,’ came a vox from one of Forelm’s brethren. ‘Smoke from small fires, and cleared land to our south-west.’

‘Then this,’ said Hajos with a rare smile, ‘is where it begins.’

The people of this world called it Jaeglor, the Endless Green, the Devourer of the Unwary. They lived in a collection of huts and low earth lodges, and they kept fires lit to ward off the jungle’s predators. They watched, terrified, from the treeline as Lord Hajos and the Dire Claws entered their village.

‘You!’ demanded Hajos, pointing at one of the tribesmen who seemed a little less cowed than the others. ‘Come forth!’ he beckoned the man forward with a finger of his power claw.

The man walked unsteadily into the open. His well-tanned skin was covered in decorative scars and painted handprints, and he wore little more than a loincloth of animal hide. He was hung with bones and tiny animal skulls dangling from hooks and tendons worked into his skin. It was impossible to guess his age, but he looked about as old as someone on this world could get.

He spoke a few halting words that Hajos did not understand. ‘Can you translate?’ Lord Hajos asked of Koridis.

‘It is an old Low Gothic dialect,’ said Koridis. ‘I have tomes in such a language. These people must be psuedo-natives left over from the latter days of the Scattering, reverted to sub-feudal levels.’

‘What does he say?’

‘He asks who we are.’

‘Then tell him.’

Koridis translated, and the tribespeople swapped nervous glances as they drank in the news that these enormous armoured warriors had come from the sky and brought their superior gods with them. It was impossible to gauge how much of it they believed, or even understood. People such as these had been separated from the bulk of humanity for so long that many thought they were autocthonous, born from the earth of whatever world they had settled thousands of years ago.

‘He asks that we show mercy,’ said Koridis, translating the words of the tribe’s elder. ‘His people are pious and humble. They will make offerings to their god if it will placate us.’

‘Pious?’ said Hajos. ‘To whom? Who is their god? Ask them!’

Koridis translated Hajos’ demand and in reply, the elder pointed to the far end of the village, where a dozen huts clustered around a rise in the earth. Atop that rise was a statue of black stone. ‘They call it Serpentias,’ said Koridis. ‘It sounds like a typical ancestor-god, some ancient leader deified and worshipped.’

Hajos crossed the village to the statue, followed by the fearful eyes of the tribespeople. Up close, Serpentias did not strike Lord Hajos as impressive. The statue was of a huge and muscular man, caught in a pose of open-mouthed anguish, yelling at the sky. There was no denying that the crude sculpting had a certain flair to it, as if Serpentias’ aggression and ambition had been captured in the grainy black stone, but it was a strange idol to have captured the devotion of a people.

Hajos crouched by the base of the statue, scattering the offerings of trinkets and animal skulls the tribe had left there. He gripped the statue around the knees and, as the servos of his armour hissed and smoked with the effort, the mass of stone shifted. With a roar, Lord Hajos uprooted the statue from the earth where it had stood for centuries. The tribespeople shrieked with alarm as he adjusted his grip to hold Serpentias like a stricken enemy over his head.

‘There are no gods but those of the warp!’ bellowed Hajos, knowing Koridis would translate his words. ‘All others shall be cast down! The lords of the warp are your gods now, not this sham god of stone! To the lords of Plague, of Secrets, of Excess and of the Shedding of Blood, you will pledge your souls! Or you will be broken!’

Hajos cast down the statue. It shattered into thousands of chunks of stone. A terrible wailing rose from the tribespeople, until the elder turned to them and shouted out a few words of their language. The wailing quieted and the elder turned back to Koridis and conversed for a moment.

‘They do not wish war,’ said Koridis as Hajos walked back from the site of Serpentias’ fall. ‘These people make gods of the strong. If you prove strong enough, they will not defy us.’

‘So we must prove our strength?’ said Hajos. ‘I do not foresee that as being a problem.’

The first trial of Serpentias had been to delve into the smoking volcanic labyrinth beneath the Scalding Vale and read there the secrets left behind by the ancients. Those ancients had founded the various tribes and scattered them across the jungles to carve out their own kingdoms, make war with one another, and rise and fall as fate would have it. From among them rose heroes like Serpentias, and to such heroes, the legends maintained, those ancients left secrets to be uncovered.

This was the knowledge Koridis had gleaned from interrogating the elder of Serpentias’ tribe. Hajos had immediately set off to the Scalding Vale to find what the ancients had left behind for himself.

They were not proving amenable to the worship of the Dark Gods, these people of Jaeglor. It was no surprise. The demands of the warp powers could be onerous to the weak or the squeamish. The Dire Claws had to break down the faith and morality of the Jaeglori before they could become devotees of Chaos. The first step was to prove Lord Antonidas Hajos superior to the fallen Serpentias.

The volcanic caverns were lit by channels of superheated rock in the walls, like pulsing veins fat with blood. Hajos felt his body’s augmentations fighting to keep him alive in the heat and almost complete lack of oxygen.

‘The readings indicate a junction ahead of you, my lord,’ came the vox from Brother Forelm. Forelm was near the entrance to the caverns, reading the layout of the tunnels and chambers with the squad’s auspex. ‘Heavy toxic readings and heat spikes.’

‘Then this Serpentias must have learned to hold his breath,’ said Hajos. ‘A strange qualification for godhood. Any life sign readings?’

‘Nothing,’ replied Forelm. ‘But the heat and magnetism could mask them.’

Hajos’ question was answered more conclusively by the mass of rippling wet muscle that surged at him from a side passage. It was a fat, worm-like creature with a round mouth ringed with teeth of flinty stone. The worm poured into the main tunnel, filling it like a flood of liquid flesh. Its jaws were as wide as Hajos was tall. Hajos reacted with a Space Marine’s superhuman speed, rounding on the creature as it loomed down to swallow him. He thrust his arms out and pinned its circular maw open, fighting against the tremendous force of the worm as it sought to close its jaws and bite Hajos in half at the waist.

‘Foul thing!’ growled Hajos. ‘What dares a worm to threaten the Lord of Jaeglor?’ With a grunt, Hajos drove his arms outwards and felt the muscle tearing. Teeth broke loose from their roots and plinked to the floor. The worm let out a foul exhalation of sulphur and ash, and Hajos forced himself out of its mouth.

Hajos activated the power field around his claw. The blades had already punched deep into the muscles around the worm’s jaws and they smouldered as the blood and flesh caught between them ignited. Hajos rammed the claws into the worm’s body just behind its head, shredding the flesh and leaving the head hanging by a precarious string of skin. A stream of gore and gritty half-digested rock flowed it.

‘What more has this world for me?’ yelled Hajos into the darkness. ‘You think me a morsel to be swallowed down? You will be corrected!’

A trio of rock worms erupted from the many side tunnels. Each was a cousin to the first, faster and smaller, though still huge enough to swallow a man whole. Hajos was ready for them this time. He blasted the head of the first into a mass of ragged, glistening flesh with a burst from his bolt pistol, then turned to the next and met its strike with his power claw, stabbing the blades deep down its throat and slicing through to its minuscule brain. He ripped the claw free as the third squirmed its way down the tunnel ahead of him. Hajos met it with a boot, stamping down on its upper jaw, driving it down into the scalding rock. He slashed his claw along the length of its body, slicing it lengthways and laying the foul length of its organs open to the scorching air.

The thing stopped thrashing. Hajos extricated himself from the mass of torn muscle and skin. The tunnel was shin-deep in gore, boiling in the volcanic heat.

‘There is no threat here worth speaking of,’ voxed Hajos as he continued down towards the nadir of the tunnel complex. ‘This Serpentias was a weakling or a liar.’

In a long, low chamber created by some strata of rock eroded away an aeon ago, Hajos saw what lay beneath the Scalding Vale. A mass of machinery had become entombed here, in places encased in rock that had flowed into the chamber as lava and cooled. The steel was scarred and wounded, not just by thousands of years underground but by the familiar marks of atmospheric entry and micrometeorite strikes. Hajos made out the front section of a spaceship, aerodynamically configured for planetside flight, with its cockpit shattered and laid open. Heat had blistered the plastics of the cockpit so the instrument panels and pilot’s seat looked more like something biological, a mass of glossy black organs that had bubbled up from an infected wound.

Hajos saw the corroded remains of a skeleton in the cockpit, almost swallowed by the melted plastic. The bones were eaten away but in places were shored up with silvery implants, like a weave of fine metallic wire, underpinning the structure of the bone.

Most of the paint had blistered off the hull in the heat, but Hajos could still see the bright orange and blue livery and markings in a language that bore no relation to High or Low Gothic. The shape of the spacecraft echoed the heavy prows of Imperial warships, but with a sleeker, faster appearance and none of the ornamentation common to ships of the Imperium.

The craft was a relic of the Dark Age of Technology or perhaps even the Age of Terra, epochs that pre-dated the conquest of Earth, the rise of the Corpse-Emperor and the Imperium of Man. It followed the same principles of the Standard Template Constructs that still guided the Imperium’s technology, but in a purer, more refined form. If Serpentias had truly delved down here, he had learned the ancients travelled in ships of steel and possessed technological magic that had now been lost. The exact significance of the spacecraft would have been lost to him but he could not have returned from this place without his understanding of the ancients being fundamentally altered.

‘So this is what you found,’ said Hajos. He picked up the skull from the ruins of the cockpit. Over the millennia it had become a pitted, rock-like chunk. ‘It is as we suspected. This world is just one more relic of the Scattering, fallen to ignorance and savagery. Nothing special at all.’ Hajos allowed himself a smile, his grin echoing the rictus of the skull in his hand. ‘Yet.’

The first shrine was one dedicated to the sky. That was where, in the primitive comprehension of these people, the warp could be found. A circle of obelisks, cut from black volcanic glass, was being raised in a newly cleared section of jungle, around a pit where sacrifices would be burned and fortunes would be read from the smoke. The tribal elder preached the words Koridis had dictated to him, vague promises of power and strength from the sky, as the tribesmen sweated in the evening sun to haul the obelisks upright.

‘Yet Serpentias did not tell them what he had found,’ said Koridis, examining the petrified skull Lord Hajos had brought back from the Scalding Vale. ‘This Serpentias, if he indeed realised the origins of his people, kept it from them. There is no trace of technologically advanced ancients in their native belief.’

‘He knew it made him weak,’ said Hajos. He watched the erecting of the ritual circle alongside Koridis, from the fortified tribal lodge that had become the base camp of the Dire Claws. ‘He feared the knowledge that there was once a people more powerful than he. The tribes would have worshipped these idiot settlers instead. Is that not seen on many such worlds?’

‘It is so, my lord,’ said Koridis. ‘Or it could be he did not think he would be believed. Many are also the tales of prophets on savage worlds who claimed their peoples were descended from sky-travellers, and who were burned for their heresy.’

‘Not that it matters,’ said Hajos. ‘I went to the depths of the Scalding Vale and returned with a relic of a time beyond their remembering. Thus I am Serpentias’ equal. I barely broke a sweat doing it, either. I think my second heart did not even bother to beat.’

‘It will not be enough to usurp this tribe’s god,’ said Koridis. ‘I have spent much time communing with their wise men. There are other tribes, too, and they have their own gods. Some such deities cross tribal boundaries – they may not be the patrons of every tribe, but every tribe honours and sacrifices to them. This tribe is beneath our thumb and I shall convert them in quick time, but one gaggle of savages does not make a civilisation to rule. There are other gods on Jaeglor, and they must fall.’

‘I see,’ said Lord Hajos. He cast the skull into the dirt, and drew his bolt pistol. ‘Where are they?’

The Dire Claws moved carefully through the jungle. Even in the dense foliage of the Green Abyss, the burned orange of their armour was obvious as they stalked through the deepening shadows.

‘Watch your backs,’ snarled Forelm over the vox. ‘This scaly hrud-sniffer is smarter than you think. And Vurkal, spread out! One burst vine will wipe out all three of you morons!’

It was inevitable that the people of Jaeglor would ascribe a mystical significance to hunting, an activity at once deadly, infinitely complex and necessary for survival. Jaeglor’s hunters, however, knew their limitations, whether they were tracking down game for meat, predators for trophies or each other. The Dire Claws had no such limitations. They were after a creature that no hunter of Jaeglor had ever sought to bring down.

Hajos was just behind the line of Dire Claws. Forelm’s brethren were the beaters and he was the huntsman. They were the gun and he was the bullet. It would have done no good to simply charge into the swampy mass of the Green Abyss, an area considered impassable by the tribesmen, and hope that the quarry would present itself. This had to be done with cunning. As Forelm had said, the prey was more intelligent than it seemed.

The earth beneath Hajos’ feet became more waterlogged. There were regions of the Abyss that were more river than forest, and an armoured Dire Claw was so heavy that if he was not careful he might disappear into the swampy ground entirely. It would not be a glorious way to go.

‘Life signs,’ came the vox from Brother Vurkal.

‘Of course there are bloody lifesigns,’ retorted Forelm. ‘We’re in a rainforest.’

‘Anomalous cluster two hundred metres ahead of us,’ continued Vurkal.

‘Split and encircle,’ voxed Lord Hajos.

His quarry was here. He could smell it, among the stench of decay that suffused the Green Abyss. One god, sensing the presence of another.

Up ahead the squad split into two, speeding up as they hurried to flank the suspect auspex signal. Hajos backed against the massive, gnarled bole of a tree, his bolt pistol in his hand.

‘Contact!’ came a vox up ahead. A split second later, a Dire Claw sailed through the air, punching through the mass of foliage to crack against a tree trunk and thump to the sodden ground. Bolter fire crackled and a terrible roar shook the jungle, shuddering the forest canopy.

The jungle was full of noise. Roosts of birds took flight and simian tree-dwellers whooped and screamed in alarm. Bolter explosions ripped through the trees.

Hajos stayed still. Let the brethren do the hard work driving out the prey, he told himself.

Something huge and fast crashed through the trees. Trunks splintered and fell. From the Green Abyss erupted an enormous saurian, easily three times the height of a Space Marine even with its massive head held low. Two violent red eyes glimmered above its huge undershot jaw, and its powerful forelimbs tore furrows from the ground as it loped towards Hajos. Its dark, scaly body was crowned with a ridge of spines running from its cranium down its back to the tip of its spiked tail.

The Dire Claws had driven the quarry towards their lord. Now the hunt really began.

‘The kill is mine,’ voxed Hajos calmly, and ducked out from behind the tree trunk.

The saurian saw him right away. It was impossible to hide from such a predator. The natural instinct was to run, but that would result in nothing more than being chased by the faster creature and crushed into the ground by the huge claws on its rear limbs. Hajos did not feel fear as men did. He was a Space Marine – a renegade, yes, and one pledged to the gods of the warp instead of the Emperor, but he had still been created to know no fear, and he showed none as the creature bore down on him.

The enormous maw opened. A gale roared over Hajos that stank of rotting meat. At the last moment, Hajos dropped to one knee and rolled out of the way of the saurian’s jaws, stabbing up with his power claw. The blades found scale and flesh, and he was showered in gore as the claw’s power field sheared through the saurian’s torso. The creature’s forelimb smacked him in the chest and he was thrown aside, but he had trusted in his armour to hold, and it did not let him down.

The saurian bellowed in pain and anger and sent up a tremendous spray of dirt and swamp water as it skidded to a halt. It rounded on its prey again, but Hajos was on his feet already and running right at the creature.

The wounded saurian raised a claw and batted Hajos down to the ground, pitching him face-first into the swamp water, then stamped down with its massive clawed rear leg, narrowly missing Hajos as he rolled out of the way.

The strike from the beast’s forelimb had hit harder than Hajos had anticipated, and it caught up with him now. Pain burst along his chest where the claw had impacted. His armour had held, but his ribcage felt fractured.

Hajos had expected the saurian to be dangerous, but not so quick and skilled an opponent. This was a creature that had maintained its position at the top of the food chain for thousands of years. If Hajos gave it another half-second, it would kill him.

The saurian charged. Hajos jumped to his feet, ignoring the ripples of pain across his torso. The creature knocked the boles of ancient swamp trees aside as it rushed towards Hajos. Hajos leapt right at the beast as it charged, sailing over its huge snapping jaws.

Hajos grabbed one of the spines along the saurian’s back, and plunged the blades of his power claw into its spine. He held on as the creature bucked, ripping the power claw out and plunging it back in again and again. The saurian roared but there was no anger in the sound, only pain and anguish, as if the beast could feel sorrow. It slumped onto its front. Hajos clambered up its back to its neck, and rammed the power claw into the point where it met the back of the skull.

The saurian growled, once, emptying the last of the foetid air from its lungs. Then Hajos, grunting with exhaustion and pain, drove the claw deeper into the saurian’s brainstem. The beast, the Predator God of the Green Abyss, lay still at last.

The Dire Claws oversaw the celebration of Lord Hajos’ victory. The head of the enormous saurian was burned in the sacrificial pit, and as its skull blackened in the fire, the tribespeople danced around it and howled their prayers to the Dark Gods.

‘The tribes to the north worshipped this thing as their patron god,’ said Koridis. It was he who had schooled the tribal elders in the prayers they were now crying out – prayers exhorting the powers of the warp to grant them power beyond mortality. ‘Its death will cause them to make war.’

‘Excellent,’ said Hajos. ‘These whelps need toughening up if they are to serve us. When I take to the field, even the headhunters these people fear will kneel in worship of the God of Jaeglor!’

‘Indeed,’ said Koridis. ‘Being seen to best this saurian was a necessary step in converting this world. We must be wary, however, of the consequences.’

The flames leapt higher. Already some of the tribespeople were sporting new mutations, extra limbs or cosmetic deformities brought by the fleeting touch of the warp.

‘I am ready for them, chirurgeon,’ said Hajos.

‘I am glad to hear it, my lord.’

Hajos was too busy watching the celebrations of his godhood to notice the long, slender needle extending from Koridis’ medicae gauntlet. He had no chance to react as Koridis inserted it into the base of his skull and pumped a flood of chemicals into his bloodstream.

In less than a second, the cocktail of drugs, enough to paralyse even a Space Marine, suffused Lord Hajos’ brain and shut off its higher functions. And in that moment, Jaeglor – the world of which Hajos had made himself the god – turned dark.

The eyes of the gods were on the Mouth of the Fire Serpent. The stars deformed overhead, the new constellations and discoloured nebulae a reflection of the insanity of the warp. The zealots, those who had heard the words of the gods in answer to their prayers, howled up their delight to the night sky. The rest of the tribe laboured under Forelm’s direction as they carried the litter to the volcano’s crater. When they reached the steep slope of the crater they dragged the litter on fireproof smouldervine ropes, chanting in time with their laboured footsteps.

It was possible, thought Koridis, that Lord Hajos was still conscious. He showed no signs of stirring as his litter was dragged to the top of the crater’s ridge, but that did not mean he could not hear and feel what was happening around him. The anaesthetic Koridis had used on his lord was potent, but a Space Marine’s constitution was enough to overcome it eventually. Not that it would do Hajos any good now.

‘Bring the holy flame for the Lord of Change!’ cried Brother Forelm up on the crater ridge. He held up a hand and pulled off the gauntlet of his power armour, running his palm along the jagged edge of his shoulder guard. A bright wet slash glimmered on his palm. ‘Open your veins for the Blood God!’

‘Send him in,’ voxed Koridis.

Forelm gestured to the tribesmen carrying the litter. Hajos still did not move. He was bound there securely – even if he woke up, he would be unlikely to free himself in time. The screaming of the zealots reached a crescendo as the litter was pushed over the edge of the crater and tumbled end over end into the lava.

Koridis had read of the belief systems typical of savage peoples. It was very common for a powerful ancestor to be ascribed mighty deeds and subsequently deified. Almost as common was the way such a myth-cycle ended.

With sacrifice.

If Hajos was indeed conscious, he would feel the heat enveloping him, every nerve ending screaming at once as he was cooked in his armour. If a Space Marine could ever feel fear, Hajos would feel it then. His body would be going numb from the outside in as his nervous system was burned out. His organs would cook and pop. And with a Space Marine’s titanic capacity to undergo injury and pain, he would suffer every elongated second.

The lava closed over the litter. Hajos’ mighty body disappeared beneath the surface.

Serpentias, like so many deified heroes before him, had to undergo a final transformation before he could become a god. He had to sacrifice himself so his might and wisdom would be unlocked from his physical form and imbue his tribe with greatness. It was the gift all such savage gods gave their people – their self-annihilation, to move beyond the grossness of the flesh and on to godhood.

Koridis’ suspicions about Serpentias had been confirmed when he examined the statue of the god that Hajos had shattered. Encased in the volcanic rock were chunks of bone. It had not been a statue at all.

‘Say the word,’ voxed Forelm.

‘A few moments more,’ replied Koridis. It paid to be sure.

In the sky, a spiral galaxy opened like an eye with a pupil of dying stars. Whatever gods of the warp had turned their attention to Jaeglor, they were watching intently. Koridis counted off the seconds and concluded that Lord Hajos had died some moments ago, boiled and suffocated beneath the lava.

‘Bring him in.’

Forelm gave the signal and the sturdiest tribesmen hauled on the smouldervine ropes to drag Lord Hajos back out of the molten rock. His body was encased in lava that began to cool immediately as he was dragged back up the crater slope.

‘Their new god,’ said Koridis. ‘The champion of the warp. The conduit of the Dark Gods’ will.’

‘If it works,’ replied Forelm.

‘It is how Serpentias became a god,’ said Koridis. ‘A new deity will draw the attention of tribes across this world. The peoples towards the equator are much more warlike, and when they bow to this new idol, we can sweep across Jaeglor and claim the planet.’ He did not add that he would be the high priest of this new empire of the warp, but that went without saying.

The lava encasing Lord Hajos was cooling and blackening in the night air. Soon he would be returned to the village and set up in the clearing where Serpentias had once stood. Word would spread of the hero who had descended from the stars, outdone the deeds of the one-time god and sacrificed himself to the fires.

The tribesmen surrounded the cooling statue. They knelt and wailed, and the elders cut new scars into their bodies in imitation of the new constellations above them.

When Koridis had joined Lord Hajos on his exile, he had not known exactly what form the opportunity would take. The legend of Serpentias had given him the perfect way to found his church, and to remove the biggest obstacle to its expansion – Lord Hajos, whose ambition masked his lack of imagination.

When they looked back, thought Koridis, they would say this was how it started. This was where it began.

And it would never end.

About the Author

Ben Counter is one of Black Library’s most popular Warhammer 40,000 authors, with two Horus Heresy novels to his name – Galaxy in Flames and Battle for the Abyss. He is the author of the Soul Drinkers series and The Grey Knights Omnibus. For Space Marine Battles he has written The World Engine and Malodrax, and has turned his attention to the Space Wolves with the novella Arjac Rockfist: Anvil of Fenris and a number of short stories. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.

The Lords of Chaos gather their forces...
The Call of Chaos echoes across across the Mortal Realms and into the grim darkness of the far future.

Two new serialised supplements, and new fiction for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Collect them all and answer the Call of Chaos.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-019-2

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o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.